ISOLATED, OPPRESSIVE AND DESPISED WORKED FOR THE AFRIKAANERS...FOR AWHILE:

A U.N. vote on Palestinian state just might offer a way forward (Trudy Rubin, 9/18/11, Philadelphia Inquirer)

As Israelis know well, their entire region is in flux in ways that make them very nervous. The status quo has crumbled within most Arab countries, nor will it last within the West Bank and Gaza.

The Oslo peace process is dead. There's plenty of blame to go around, but the coup de grace was delivered by relentless Israeli settlement expansion on the West Bank. With the end of Oslo, chances are fading for a two-state solution whereby Israel and Palestine would coexist side by side.

Many Palestinians (and much of the "street" in Arab states that are undergoing upheaval) have given up on the idea of two states. So have most Israelis. Yet the death of the two-state concept and the peace process that went with it creates existential dangers for the Jewish state.

Previous Israeli leaders knew that failure to create two states meant Israel would be left in control of a Palestinian population that would eventually outnumber Israeli Jews. That was the nightmare that drove the hawkish Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to embrace the Oslo formula.

Rabin understood that a "one-state option" would create unacceptable choices for Israel: It could become an apartheid state, controlling a majority of Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza cantons; or it could give the Palestinian majority full citizenship and lose its Jewish character.

Either option promises endless bloodshed: Each community would want to dominate the other if they were forever entwined in the same state.

The one-state option becomes even more risky in the era of the Arab awakening; the spectre of permanent Israeli occupation will doom relations with her Arab neighbors. It will sour relations with much of the world and further isolate Israel.

Palestinians have been watching tens of thousands of their Arab brethren in Cairo, Tunis, and Syrian cities carry on nonviolent demonstrations and they are bound to do likewise, sooner rather than later. What will Israel do? Permanent occupation is simply not viable for Jerusalem in the long run.

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